Winter 2011

This Thursday, March 10 at 7PM in Dreese 264, we will be having lightning talks on the Open Source projects people are working on. If you have something you are working on, please comment below so I can get an idea of the time limits for these talks. If you don't hear otherwise, assume they are five minutes each and a maximum of two talks per person. If anyone has a gong to help enforce these guidelines, please let me know. We need to do planning during this meeting as well, so please do your best to stay under time, and bring your meeting ideas.

On Thursday, March 3, at 7PM in Dreese 264, we will be having talks on shells. Dan Thau will explain ZSH, an extremely customizable and powerfull shell. Morgan Goose will present on Bash, a familiar one that still has some tricks up its sleeve. Michael Yanovich will demonstrate either ipython or bpython, a python-based shell. Matt Meinwald will show Fish, a friendlier shell. If anyone else has a shell to present, please feel free to talk for a few minutes on it. There are a lot of interesting shells out there, and it would be nice to learn about more.

On Thursday, February 24, at 7PM in Dreese 264, Sogeti USA developers Jackie Gleason and Robert Omalley will discuss Android for beginning to intermediate Java developers.

This Thursday, in Dreese Lab room 264, several of our members will be giving presentations on various markup languages.

Matt Meinwald will be going over XML. Alex Lingo will present HTML. Paul Schwendenman will be educating us on HAML. Silas Baronda will be covering reStructuredText. Daniel Thau will be presenting LaTeX. Finally, Alek Rollyson will be covering Markdown.

Tonight at 7 pm in Dreese Labs room 264, I, Michael Yanovich, will be covering various sub-topics to wireless hacking, however the main point that I want people to take away from this talk is how to secure your own wireless network from these types of attacks. I'll be covering a brief outline on how wireless networks work, the several types of encryption available, and other settings that can set to try to protect your network.

This Thursday, February 3 at 7PM in Dreese 264, Jonathan Tubb will be going over the basics of Microcontrollers, uses, and programming. Specific devices will include the TI MSP line of chips as well as Arduino (Atmega). Finished projects will also be brought in as examples. Feel free to bring and show off your own projects.

As always there will be pizza.

This Thursday, Alex Lingo will be presenting on the topic of Blender. Blender is a powerful 3D modeling and rendering program, similar to applications such as Maya or 3DS Max. Alex's presentation will cover the history of blender, basic 3D modeling concepts, how to control Blender with the keyboard and mouse, and will conclude with a live demonstration that will hopefully go as planned, with no mistakes or confusion, guaranteed.

This Thursday, January 20, in *Dreese Labs room 480* at 7PM, we will be participating in a quiz bowl event with UPE and ACM-W. This event will consist of a qualifier round where two teams of four will be selected based on individual knowledge of computer science trivia. These teams will face each other, then the winning team will face a faculty team. There will be pizza, pop, and prizes.

Attached is a flyer for this event.

This Thursday, at 7 pm in Dreese Labs room 264, Brian Swaney will be demonstrating use of the GIMP image editor. GIMP is what some might consider an open source alternative to the proprietary $800 Photoshop application, except that many people refuse to consider it on the grounds that it is allegedly inferior, and therefore unusable. While I'm not familiar with Photoshop, I will debunk the myth about GIMP being unusable, and show just how powerful GIMP can be for those who take the time to learn it.

Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 7:00PM in Dreese 264 (note the change in location), Daniel Thau will be giving a dual presentation covering the chroot operation as well as the Linux From Scratch project.